He was popularly known as the King of the B-Movies. And as with Supreme Court Justice Byron White and his college football nickname Whizzer, Roger Corman hated that title. For one thing, he preferred to regard them as A pictures on B budgets (though I’m sure others would take issue with that assessment). Earlier this month, Corman passed on to that Great Fire Marshall Condemned Studio in the Sky at the age of 98. He could have made it to a full century the way fellow schlock director/producer Bert I. Gordon did last year. But Corman always was determined to keep his production schedules as short as he could get them.

Before we go on, a slight digression that will prove relevant. It has been said that, back in the days of Vaudeville, gag men were a dime a dozen. The straight man however was not as common, and a talented one like Bud Abbott was worth his weight in iridium. It was the gag men who got all the fame, all the glory, and all the beautiful women (just consider how, on the Abbott and Costello TV show, Lou’s girlfriend was portrayed by the stunning Hillary Brooke). But without a competent straight man to set up the jokes, the gag man was less than nothing. Just look at the way Jerry Lewis deteriorated after his split with Dean Martin. And there are some who would argue Lewis wasn’t that great to begin with.

In a similar vein, the entertainment press and the cinephiles idolize the Arteests, a certain class of directors, writers, and upper tier actors. And it’s true that Arteests who are on their game can produce incredible films. But the adulation these people receive can easily go to their heads, encouraging disruptive behavior that is ultimately to the detriment of a production.

Going relatively unappreciated are the Professionals. These are the bit part actors, cameramen, gaffers, riggers, stuntmen, audio technicians, and other such persons who serve as the foundation of any film production and ensure that Stuff Gets Done. They know their jobs and show up on set and on time to perform those duties to the best of their ability. But perhaps the most important Professional is the producer who can look into the eyes of an Arteest making unreasonable demands and deliver a polite but firm, “No,” and make it stick.

Roger Corman may not have been an Arteest, but by gawd he was a Professional!

Unlike so many other filmmakers, there’s no indication that Corman had any particular interest in the cinematic arts while growing up. In fact, when he enrolled at Stanford, it was to follow in his father’s footsteps by studying to be an engineer. But as his schooling went on, he increasingly found the prospect unappealing. So much so that he quit his first job at U.S. Electric Motors after just four days, switching to a minimum wage job at the 20th Century Fox mail room.

Having been bitten by the Tinseltown bug, Corman worked his way up the ranks at Fox and became a story reader. But even then, he was a bit of an outsider, and the way the mainstream studios operated did not appeal to him. On the rare occasions where he would partner with one later in his career, the experience would always prove unsatisfactory. So it was little wonder that AIP was his primary employer through the 1950s and 1960s. Corman’s knack for completing films with tight budgets and tighter shooting schedules was a good fit for the studio’s low budget/high profit model. And AIP’s specializing in genres that were underserved or ignored by the mainstream studios allowed Corman to focus on material that interested him.

A way to describe the movies he made at AIP (particularly the black and white ones) would be what if Ed Wood was actually competent. Now one of the things we love about Wood is his childlike obliviousness to the fact that he had no idea what he was doing. It’s a major factor in why we find his movies entertaining. Yet there is a niggling curiosity that wishes to visit an alternate timeline where whatever talent he might have had didn’t get sabotaged by alcoholism. It’s not unreasonable to believe that they might have been like some of Corman’s mid-tier efforts at AIP, like It Conquered the World, The Undead, and The Little Shop of Horrors. Still with minimal, almost slapdash, production values, yet also featuring halfway capable acting performances and a coherent narrative.

A prominent reason for the highly variable quality of the films Corman directed is that he almost never wrote the screenplays. His IMDB profile lists just 10 writing credits, and many of these are for story (essentially an outline of the events in the film). If he hired someone like Richard Matheson, you could be sure of the script being a winner. On the other hand, if the writer was one of the usual AIP hacks like Charles B. Griffith or Mark Hanna, matters got a bit more dicey.

If there’s any part of his filmography which not even his most ardent detractors can casually dismiss (at least not with a clear conscience), it’s his Poe films. As I noted in an earlier Roundtable, these were a genuine labor of love. Though he got to work with much larger budgets than he had previously received, that’s not exactly saying much. But through ingenuity forged through prior experience of dollar stretching (along with occasionally borrowing sets from other movies that happened to be handy), these truly were A pictures being shot on B budgets. And in those days before home video, viewers weren’t going to catch on to how it was the same castle going down in flames in the conclusion every time.

Like any other filmmaker, Corman had his setbacks. Sometimes a new special effects crew would drop the ball, as happened with Viking Women and the Sea Serpent. But his most infamous failure was the 1962 film The Intruder, which featured William Shatner as a Yankee bigot inciting racial violence in a Southern town. It was Corman’s first box office flop. Part of this was because, thanks to the use of racial slurs in the screenplay, it failed to gain an Approved rating and thus limited the number of theaters willing to screen it. But there was also how the subject matter provoked a lot of hard feelings. Now we all know that M*A*S*H was really about Vietnam. Yet by setting it during the Korean War, it cushioned the blow somewhat. But focusing on current affairs that inflamed so much bad blood did not go over well with movie audiences.

From that point on, Corman decided that, if he ever got the urge to Say Something Important in one of his films, it would be secondary to the movie being entertaining.

Something which Corman is often derided for but shouldn’t be is his efficient production scheduling. One of his most useful tools in this regard was an air pilot’s manual. Now you might wonder what good an air pilot’s manual would do in regard to filmmaking. As it turns out, the one thing the two have in common is that inclement weather can ruin the day for both. Contained in this manual was detailed information on the rainy seasons for every corner of the globe. This was particularly critical if he wished to film in a region where periods of rain would go on for days so that he could arrive during the dry season.

Corman also recognized that, while it’s good to learn from your mistakes, it’s better to learn from the mistakes of other people. This came into play during his penultimate credited directing effort Von Richthofen and Brown, a World War I epic about the conflict’s most famous ace and the man credited with taking him down (though there is some dispute on that point).

Aerial scenes were shot outside Dublin, Ireland, where there was a collection of vintage aircraft previously used in the productions of The Blue Max and Darling Lili. Those two films were legendary for their scheduling overruns, and it all came down to the erratic weather in that part of Ireland. Places like Chicago often joke that, if you don’t like the current weather, just wait a few minutes. But this truly was the case here, where it could go from clear to overcast and back with virtually no warning. Both of the prior productions had insisted that flying scenes occur during good weather. So they would often find themselves twiddling their thumbs waiting for the skies to clear, much to the annoyance of the studio suits.

Corman’s production took a more flexible approach. Each air sequence was assigned whether they would be shot in clear or overcast conditions or if it didn’t really matter. However, this willingness to shoot in less than ideal conditions also meant that accidents were more frequent. But as the adage goes, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.

After completing Von Richthofen and Brown, Corman had become aware of how much his preferred method of directing films with tight shooting schedules was a young man’s game. With his forties rapidly passing him by, he chose to quit directing and switched to producing full time, which was much less arduous. It was also about this time that he formed New World Pictures. Particularly during the 1970s, much of New World’s product was sleazy exploitative (yet entertaining) schlock. But Corman also aspired towards more classy offerings and imported many an arty foreign film, marketing them to the masses. Some of the directors whose films he distributed include François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa.

One more truth his detractors have been forced to acknowledge is how he was responsible for getting some of Hollywood’s biggest names their first real chance to be in pictures. To give you an idea of what I speak, let us gaze into this portal to an alternate timeline where Corman decided to stay in industrial engineering.

There’s Jack Nicholson on L.A.’s Skid Row subsisting on Thunderbird, never having gotten his break with a lead role in The Cry Baby Killer. There’s Ron Howard going through the more traditional former child star meltdown because he never got to direct Grand Theft Auto. And there are so many more that owe their careers to Corman. Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Robert de Niro, Charles Bronson, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Irvin Kershner, James Cameron, Tommy Lee Jones, James Horner, and Joe Dante, among others.

This influence was so apparent that the Academy eventually presented him with an honorary Oscar for, “His rich engendering of films and filmmakers.” Truth be told, the current generation of filmmakers could have benefitted from a Corman apprenticeship.

Don’t let all this praise have you believe that everything Corman touched was cinematic gold. I’m fully aware that he’s had his share of stinkers. Certainly nothing can forgive the existence of Teenage Cave Man or Munchie. Even so, we should always remember that he’s responsible for producing the only live action Fantastic Four movie that is even remotely good. And considering the current trend in superhero moves, that status is not likely to be challenged in the foreseeable future.

So let us have one final toast for Roger Corman. Tinseltown is a poorer place without him. Yet it is also true that none of us can STAAAAAY!!!!!